A New Way of Measuring Progress

09/13/2010 05:04 PM

How do we define progress? In a speech to TED talks, new economics foundation Statician Nic Marks challenges the notion that benchmarks such as GDP, focused on how much we produce, tell us anything about the welfare of a nation. He proposes a new way of measuring progress, one based on country’s success at providing happy, healthy lives for their citizens, while preserving the natural capital that will make such lives possible for the next generation. “When economics deals with a scare resource, it thinks in terms of efficiency. How much bang do we get for our buck. The Happy Planet Index is ultimately an efficiency measure: How much well-being we get for our planetary resource use.” Learn which countries fare the best by this measure of success.